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One Psych Thing That I Will Remember 5 Years From Now...

Five years from now I think the thing about psychology that I will remember is probably the Milgram experiment on authority obedience. The reason why I will remember this is because this concept really struck me as extremely interesting. The whole thing about how 62 percent of the people in his study killed the subject (if there had been one getting shocked) and how quickly they listened to the man in the lab coat really amazed me. We all think that we would never do something like that but Milgram has proven us all wrong, well 62 percent of us wrong.

Also, another reason why I will remember this is because this was one section that I really studied a lot. Not just because it intrigued me, but because it had a lot of important information about different situations and how we react to them. This section was so interesting to me that I even wrote a whole separate blog post about it!

When I was asked questions on the exam about things that were related to this section I knew them all because I had studied this section so much. I guess the book was right that the more you repetitions of something you do the easier it is to remember/perform. I'm getting at a little two for one here with the Milgram experiment and Long Term memory.

Anyways, Milgram was a super smart dude and he had a very interesting experiment.

To Sarah, Milgram never said if the behavior was conditioned by one or the other. I would hypothesize that if behavior was related to one or the other, than it would be more conditioned by society because society places a strong authoritarian view on figures.

The results of this experiment seem really strange to me. Authority figures should have some sort of control over their subordinates, but to an extent like this? In the military I can see how people would obey as readily as this, but in a controlled experiment like this seems just like overkill. It bewilders me to think people would do something like this just because a person with a lab coat says continue...

I really believe that Milgram's study shows that people aren't really able to think for themselves these days, what I mean is that we do what were told and believe what were told, but we don't think about it at all on our own.